


Once Upon Some Bullshit

by machine_dove, Sproings



Category: Captain America (Movies), Marvel Cinematic Universe, The Avengers (Marvel Movies)
Genre: Abuse of Fairy-Tale Motifs, Animal Transformation, Fluff, Happily Ever After, M/M, Magic, Mutual Pining, Pining, fluff and nonsense, jewish bucky
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-07-27
Updated: 2017-07-27
Packaged: 2018-12-07 09:23:40
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 12,584
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11620668
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/machine_dove/pseuds/machine_dove, https://archiveofourown.org/users/Sproings/pseuds/Sproings
Summary: Bucky really hated magic.  He had always hated magic, ever since the first time he'd been forced to believe in it, back in the trenches in occupied France.He hated it even more now.A beautiful white swan was standing where Steve should have been, and Enchantress was fucking giggling like the asshole she was.In which magic is terrible, Steve is sick of this bullshit, and True Love Conquers All





	1. Chapter One

Bucky really hated magic.  He had always hated magic, ever since the first time he'd been forced to believe in it, back in the trenches in occupied France.

He hated it even more now.

A beautiful white swan was standing where Steve should have been, and Enchantress was fucking giggling like the asshole she was.

"You're so much prettier this way," she crooned, reaching out to pet the swan.

Bucky would have felt bad for her, if she wasn't such an asshole.  But as it was, he kinda enjoyed watching the way her face went from smug and superior to terrified and appalled.  

The swan rose up and punched Enchantress in the face, with both wings, and proceeded to hiss and spit and claw at her, showing every bit of Steve's usual idiotic fury.

"How is he doing that?" Clint asked.  "He's so little, he shouldn't be able--"

"Believe me, bein' little never once slowed that fucker down," Bucky said, before jumping over the edge of the rooftop they'd been sharing.

"Huh.  That, uh, that's happening," Tony said over the comms.  "I can't get a shot.  Anyone want to jump in there with Sir Bites-a-Lot?"

Wanda scoffed.  "And get in his way?  Thank you, no."

"Why did she think a swan was a good idea?  Swans are evil," said Sam.  "Swans are directly descended from Satan.  Why would--"

Bucky yanked out his earpiece.  It had been a long time since he'd fought beside a tiny rage monster, and he needed to focus.

Swan-Steve twisted around to one side, and Bucky waded into the fight without hesitation, taking a swing at Enchantress and not thinking about which side Steve's bad ear used to be on, so many years ago.

He scooped up Steve's shield and blocked a tendril of green light from reaching the swan, hoping desperately that he hadn't kept her from reversing the goddamn spell.  Swan-Steve darted under and pecked at Enchantress's knees, making her shriek and dance back.

They fought the way they always fought, side by side, more worried about each other's safety than their own.  All too soon there was a flash of bright green, and Enchantress was gone.

Steve was a swan.  Steve was a fucking swan, which was so much worse than when he'd gotten himself turned into a bulky super-soldier.  At least then he'd kept his blue eyes and his long fingers and his stupid deep voice, telling lies about how it only hurt a little and making Bucky's chest ache the way he always did.

Bucky held his hand out.  Steve nudged it with his head, then huffed and curled into a feathery ball, glaring around at everyone.  So at least his attitude was still intact.  Bucky joined him in glaring around.

Wanda was biting her lip and shaking her head.  Tony had flipped up his visor and was frowning deeply.

"C'mon," Bucky said, with a nonchalance he did not feel.  "Let's get you to the lab so they can fix you up."  

He scooped the swan into his arms and started walking.  Steve would get back to normal, somehow.  He was too damned stubborn not to, and the alternative was not worth thinking about.

In the end, it just wore off.  For three hours they poked him and scanned him and muttered to each other, even bringing Bruce in to mutter with them, but at 7:08 PM the swan glowed white and Steve appeared in its place, all two hundred and twelve angry pounds of him.

Bucky heaved a silent sigh of relief at the way those blue eyes flashed and that square jaw clenched, and he punched Steve in the shoulder before any shouting happened.

"Welcome back, dumbass.  You learn anything about going hand-to-hand against a fucking magic-user?"

"Yeah, next time I'll hit her sooner," Steve shot back, and he was exactly stupid enough to punch Bucky's metal shoulder, probably on purpose.  The old familiar ache in Bucky's chest roared up fiercer than ever.

"You need to eat.  It's been a long goddamn day."  Bucky slung his arm around Steve's shoulders and dragged him toward the elevator, while Tony squawked about tests and waiting and 'just one fucking minute Winter Buzzkill!'

The elevator doors closed, and Steve muttered, "Glad that's over."

Bucky winced.  He hated magic, and he didn't begin to trust that it was really over.  But all he said was, "Yeah pal, me too."   

 

* * *

 

Clint supposed he'd done his fair share of weird stuff.  He'd fought actual literal space aliens.  He'd made his own exploding arrows, which he didn't find all that weird, but Natasha had assured him it was.  He'd been coated in glittery slime one time, in a fight with a gross plant monster thing.  So maybe he should be used to weird stuff, or have a higher standard for weirdness.

Taking a dog on the elevator still seemed weird, though.

He did it twice a day, because he wasn't a masochist, no matter what his dating history might say, so he wasn't going to take the stairs.  It just seemed weird twice a day.

Anyway, he thought, holding open the door so Lucky could go out in front of him, a dog had to do what a dog had to do.  There weren't any grassy places inside for Lucky to go on.

Maybe he could convince Tony to plant some grass in the hallway.  

He let Lucky lead the way around the block, wondering if he could get Natasha to push Tony in the right direction.  Maybe he'd even make a robot to scoop up the mess, and another one to mow, and...

"Dude, get your nose outta the grate, there's nothing in there for you."

Lucky shot Clint a skeptical look and went back to sniffing and pawing at the storm drain.

Well, Lucky was the expert here.  What did Clint know about sniffing storm drains?   

He stepped back to get a better look and--

"Kitten!"

That finally earned him a tail wag from Lucky, and a baleful glare from the kitten, who was clinging desperately to a ledge down inside the drain.

Arrows with safety nets.  He knew he'd find a use for them one day, dammit, he never should have let Sam talk him out of making them.  Instead the only option he had was to pull his belt off, lower the end of it through the grill and hope that the kitten would eventually figure out how to climb.

He shouldn't have worried.  The kitten dove recklessly for the belt as soon as it was in range and shimmied up with no coaxing at all, right into Clint's hand.

It was tiny and soaked and it gave a rusty meow as Lucky nuzzled at it a bit, and Clint's heart grew three sizes just watching how gentle Lucky was.

The kitten turned around and gave a low growl at Clint, with its face all scrunched up like it was giving orders, and Clint chuckled.  It just looked so ridiculous, with its filthy orange and white fur sticking up in corkscrews all over.  He reluctantly lowered it down to the sidewalk to set it free, but Lucky nudged it to keep it in place, not that it had made any move to leave.

"Huh.  You think we should take it home?  At least let it warm up a little?"

Lucky fixed his eye solemnly on Clint and nudged the kitten again.

"Right."

It turned out that riding on an elevator with a dog and the dog's kitten was even weirder than with just a dog.

He got up to the common area, figuring it was as good a place as any to give the kitten a bath.

Sam smiled at him from one of the couches.  " _Hey man how [...] Lucky?  What's [...] jacket?"_

"Shit, hang on."  Clint dug his hearing aids out of his pocket and hooked them on.  "What was that?"

"Clint.  You either need to go see a real doctor immediately, or you’ve got something small, wet, and furry inside your hoodie."

"It’s a kitten," Clint said, opening his zipper a little to give Sam a better look.  "Lucky fished him out of a storm drain.  I guess he decided he needed a pet of his own."

"You sure you want to keep him, man?  He looks kind of mad, maybe he has rabies," Sam said, as the kitten turned its glare of doom on him.

Actually, Clint hadn't been sure, until he found himself saying, "His name is Fluffernutter, and I’m not keeping him, Lucky is."

Sam held his hand up for a fistbump.  "My man!  The best of all sandwiches!"

"I know!  C'mon, help me give him a bath."

Half an hour later, they were both bleeding from various scratches and covered in soap, and Clint was starting to regret putting his aids in.  

Fluffernutter was clean (and angry) and wouldn't stop meowing (angrily) at everybody and everything.  He even meowed (angrily) at Friday, who was just a disembodied voice offering them pizza, which is the best possible kind of disembodied voice.  

The poor kitten never purred.  Not once.  Not even when it curled into a ball on Lucky's back and rested for an entire minute before it started meowing again. (Angrily.)

“Shouldn’t it be,” Clint trailed off, gesturing in the air vaguely.  “I don’t know, doing cat things?  Grooming its fur?”

“Not trying to murder us?  I don’t know man, maybe he really does have rabies,” Sam said.

Barnes stalked into the room, looking murderous as usual, and saying, "Is the pizza--"  He froze, eyes wide.  "A kitten!  Holy cow, it's adorable!"

He reached out for Fluffernutter before Clint got the chance to warn him, and Fluffernutter...

Fluffernutter climbed up the Winter Soldier's arm and started to purr.  He made a sound like a hiccup, meowed in Barnes' face, and purred some more.

Barnes cupped the kitten in his metal hand and stroked it between the ears with the other.  Fluffernutter wrapped both paws around his thumb and bit him, then let go and meowed pitifully, and started purring again.

"Oh naturally it likes you," Sam said, "The two of you can bond over your murderous tendencies."

"Where did you find him?" Barnes asked quietly, staring at the kitten.

"Storm drain down the block."

Barnes muttered something that sounded like 'Of course' and sat carefully on the couch, holding Fluffernutter against his chest.

This was definitely going on the list of weird.  Half-cyborg ex-assassin cuddling an angry kitten?  Definitely weird.  

Sweet though.  Barnes was even more gentle with Fluffernutter than Lucky was, and it was far more surprising.  Maybe he needed a kitten of his own.  Maybe--

"Hey," said Bruce, breezing into the room in as relaxed a way as he did anything, which wasn't very relaxed at all.  "Is the food here yet?"

Clint missed most of Bruce's explanation about doing experiments and missing lunch.

Fluffernutter was green.

As soon as Bruce entered the room, Fluffernutter had turned green.  Not big and green but-- "Green."

Bruce frowned at Clint, then followed his line of sight to Fluffernutter, who was fucking green and shimmering.  "Holy shit, it's a raycat."

"Don't be ridiculous," Tony announced as he came in the room.  He always sounded like he was making an announcement.  "Raycats were just a thought experiment, they never actually existe...holy shit it's a raycat!"

A bright blue whorl appeared on Fluffernutter's bright green fur as Tony crowded closer, and when Tony reached out for it, the kitten scrambled up onto Barnes' head and started hissing furiously.

That didn't slow Tony down at all, he just reached out further, until Barnes also started hissing furiously, which was both terrifying and effective.  Tony backed up a step, blinking in surprise.

"Okay, I'm gonna go...somewhere that isn't here." Bruce slowly backed away until Fluffernutter turned orange and white again, but still with the blue swirl.

Clint sighed, because he knew there was only one way this wouldn't end in a disaster.  "So, what is a raycat?"

Tony flapped his hand and didn't look away from Fluffernutter.  

"Oh, it's from Star Trek," Sam said, shooting Clint a meaningful look and cementing his reputation as the world's best wingman.

Tony could resist giving an explanation, but he couldn't resist correcting someone.  He turned and said, "No it isn't."

Sam wandered toward the kitchen area, saying over his shoulder, "Yeah, from that one movie with Baze and Chirrut."

Tony chased after him.  "That's Star Wars, not Star Trek!  And there are no raycats in it, either!  Raycats are a way to warn about radiation when there's no common language.  The idea was developed _[...]"_

Clint pulled out his aids and tucked them in his pocket.  

Barnes slowly worked on extracting tiny needle claws from his scalp.  Clint tried to help, but it only made Fluffernutter start hissing again, so he sat back and watched instead.

_"Hey pal you [...] let go [...] brain surgery [...] little punk"_

It took five minutes and a lot of gentle coaxing, but Barnes finally got Fluffernutter secured safely against his chest, with the metal hand, which was a lot less biteable than the other one.

With Stark far enough away, it was safe for Clint to put his aids back in.  He kept his voice low and said, "I'm going to tell all the tabloids that Winter Soldier kidnapped my dog's kitten."

"Pretty sure he kidnapped me," Barnes said, with a crooked little smile Clint had never seen on him before.  "He's a troublemaker."  

"Yeah, whatever, kitten-thief.  Look at poor Lucky, he's heartbroken."

Lucky was lying on the floor with his head on his paws, his eye fixed intently on the doorway to the kitchen, waiting for someone to bring him pizza.

Barnes twitched his shoulders in a silent laugh.  "He does look pretty devastated.  I'll try to find a way to make it up to him."

Clint nodded.  

"--But the whole thing depends on developing a mythos around the raycats so that--"

Sam interrupted Tony as they came back in, because it was the only way to ever talk when Tony was around, and said, "Really?  You don't figure people would just see a cat's fur turn all neon and realize that something freaky was going on?"

"Sure, but we want them to associate it with the radiation, not with the cat," Tony said.  

The blue swirl on Fluffernutter's fur came back, and Tony stared at it and absentmindedly handed Clint the slice of pizza he'd been eating.

Clint took a bite.  Around the mouthful, he said, "Is today Wednesday?"

"It's Saturday," Tony muttered, still staring.  "How could that possibly be relevant?"

"I was just thinking, Weird Wednesday.  It sounded like a thing.  Are you sure it's--"

"I need to run some tests on it, Barnes.  Come on, just four."

Barnes gave his full murderglare.  "No.  He's not an experiment."

"We need to at least scan it to make sure it's not dangerous.  Three tests, and I'll stop asking for the rest of the day."

"He's not dangerous.  He's..."  Barnes looked down at the kitten, and they held each other's eyes for a long moment. "Tomorrow.  Two tests, and you can't hurt him, and you can't start until tomorrow."

"But--"

"No buts."

"Christ, fine.  Two scans, no hurting.  Which, by the way, fuck you for implying I would."  Tony crossed his arms over his chest, and seemed genuinely hurt.  

"I..." Barnes closed his eyes and sighed.  "I know you wouldn't, not on purpose.  We'll talk about it tomorrow.  He needs today to get settled in."

Tony huffed and turned to Clint with his hand out.  He blinked in dismay.  "You ate my pizza?"

"You gave Clint pizza and expected him to do what, exactly?" Bruce said from the doorway.

"I'd already taken three bites.  Next time I want to be aware that I've made it to first base."

Clint shrugged.  "Hey, it was good for me."

"Of course it was, I'm excellent.  Come over here."

Warily, Clint followed along to the farthest corner of the room.  "You weren't planning to make out, right?  'Cause there were anchovies--"

"Is the blue still there?"

"Blue, what..." Clint turned around to see Tony squinting at Barnes and Fluffernutter.  "Ah.  No."

Tony signaled at Bruce, who sighed and stepped further into the room.  

"Oh come on," Barnes said, scowling at Tony as Fluffernutter went green all over.  

"I'm not experimenting, I'm just observing."

That turned out to be a lie, of course.  Bruce went back to the kitchen, but Tony dragged Clint all over the room, muttering about Geiger counters and lumens and whatever shit floated through his oversized brain while Barnes and Fluffernutter gave matching glares.  

Sam quietly ate his pizza, and fell back down the ranks of wingmen by not bringing any to Clint.

Finally, Barnes gave up scowling and dragged a blanket over to cover himself and the kitten, while staring pointedly at Tony.

"That's just childish," Tony pouted.

"Us elderly folks gotta get our kicks somewhere."

"I wasn't even doing anything!"

"You were turning him blue.  You have no idea what it might be doing to him."

"Best way to know that is to let me--"

"You're not fucking scanning him!"

"If you would just--"

Tendrils of deep green rose up from under the blanket.

"Shit!"   Barnes pulled off the blanket and made to get up, but he was too late.

Barnes had a lapful of Steve.

Steve.

Curled up on Barnes' lap.

"Aww, Fluffernutter."

Steve glared at Clint, and really, his glare was exactly the same as when he was a kitten, Clint should have recognized it sooner.

Sam threw his hands up.  "Okay, are we sure it's not Wednesday?"

 

* * *

 

Steve apologized for scratching Clint and Sam, even though he still felt justified, since they'd dunked him in soapy water, and he apologized to Lucky for not being a kitten, even though Lucky didn't seem to care at all.

He didn't apologize to Tony, who had taken one look at him, turned to Bucky and said, "You asshole!  You knew!  That's why you wouldn't let me scan him."

Steve wanted to hiss at him all over again, which was a very odd thing to want.

Bucky shrugged everything off and called Wanda.

After she came up and heard the whole story, she gently patted Steve's shoulder.  "Do you remember any of it?"  
  
Did he remember finally getting a taste of what he'd always wanted most in the world?  
  
Being safe in Bucky's arms.  Being wrapped in his scent.  Feeling his voice rumble through his chest.  
  
It wasn't a sex thing.  Steve would know, he had a lifetime's worth of dirty thoughts about Bucky to compare it to.  But hell if he wouldn't give up kissing for the rest of eternity if it meant being held like that again.  
  
"Uh, yeah, I remember, it's just a little--"  
  
"Fuzzy?" Tony supplied cheerfully.  
  
Steve gritted his teeth.  "Hazy."    
  
"Does he even need to be here?" Bucky asked Wanda.  
  
Before she could answer, Tony said, "Hey, I'm the tech expert who might have a chance at fixing the Swan Prince.  Why are you here?"  
  
"Because I asked him to be," Steve lied.  He didn't need to ask Bucky for things like that.

Bucky had a perfect poker face.  He didn't react at all to Steve's story, he just sneered at Tony, "So how are you planning to fix it, Geek Squad?"

"If you had let me scan him--"

"Stop."  

Wanda hadn't raised her voice, but everyone immediately went silent.  Steve might envy that, except he knew a little about the burdens of power, and her power was immeasurable.

She looked between Steve and Bucky, then at Tony, then back to Steve, then Bucky again.  Her eyes narrowed.  "The spell is not active now.  We can only wait until dawn and see if Steve will change again.  If he does, I can change him back, but there's nothing more I can do until then.  Tony, we should set up a space in the medical wing, so your scanners will be ready..."

She led the way out of the room, leaving Steve and Bucky in blessed quiet.

 

* * *

 

The marathon was coming up in a month.  Rhodey was almost guaranteed to beat his best time this year, but that was no excuse for slacking off.  
  
He pushed himself harder, chasing the burn, chasing the pain, needing every bit of it he could find, now that only half of him could feel.  
  
Well damn, that was one of those thoughts he should mention in his next therapy session.  
  
He coasted to a stop at the side of the path and dug out his water bottle.  There was some kind of commotion on the bridge up ahead, he might as well drink before he tried to thread his chair through the crowd.  Hopefully without crushing any toes.  This time.    
  
The sweat on his back and chest chilled rapidly in the March air, leaving him just this side of miserable.  His internal thermostat didn't work any better than his legs did anymore, and he couldn't contain the shiver that rolled through him.  
  
He had 12 miles left to go.  He tossed his empty bottle in a recycle bin and pushed on, into the crowd.  
  
"--alligators in New York, morons."  
  
"Yeah, no aliens either. Ohhhh waaaait."  
  
"So now it's a space alligator?"  
  
"I'm just saying..."  
  
The teen girls were too far away to hear any more, but Rhodey had heard enough already.  
  
Tony had spent half the night chattering happily about Captain Rogers being a raycat yesterday, and a swan the day before.  It was probably just a weird shadow in the water, but--  
  
Fuck.  
  
Shadows aren't bright white and perfectly alligator shaped.

He wasn't convinced, he wasn't sure at all, but if there was any chance that it was Rogers...  
  
He gritted his teeth and hit the 'alert' button that his asshole of a best friend had installed in his chair, then dove into the pond.

See, this was why he'd gone Air Force and not Navy.  The water was fucking awful.  
  
Diving down to the alligator went fine, except for how it was an actual alligator, in a duckpond, in Manhattan, in March.  

He really should have practiced swimming with one hand, though.  It was exactly as hard as it sounded, which was to say, nearly impossible.  If he survived this, he planned to spend more time in Tony's pool, doing rescue drills.  He could make up some dummies of different sizes.  Start smaller than the alligator, which was only about as long as his arm, and work his way up to bigger ones.  Maybe eventually throw Tony in the water and drag him back out, for practice.

A metal hand grabbed his shoulder and interrupted his thoughts.

Oh good.  He breathed in some sweet, sweet oxygen and let Barnes drag him toward the shore, where Tony and Maximoff were waiting.  Hopefully they had towels.

Tony hissed in a breath as he waded knee deep into the water, like an idiot.  "This is exactly the kind of situation where you should use the very expensive high tech suit I made for you," he scolded as he grabbed Rhodey's arms.  "I didn't name it War Machine because it was good for hopscotch.  It's even waterproof.  Unlike you."

"Wasn't time," Rhodey gasped as Tony helped him up onto the grass.  "Colder than I thought, though."

"It's him, right?" Barnes asked desperately.  He opened his leather jacket and pulled the alligator inside it, against his shirt.  

Maximoff nodded gravely.  "It is.  All of you hold on."

"Wai--"

Before Tony finished the word, the world glowed bright red, and they were in the upper med bay of the tower.

"Fucking magic," Tony grumbled.  

Rhodey was in a bed now, with Tony by his side.  Tony pulled a blanket out of a drawer and dropped it unceremoniously on Rhodey's chest.  Then the pushy asshole climbed right into the bed and wrapped the blanket around both of them, tucking his chin up against Rhodey's shoulder in a way that was warm and comforting and all kinds of wrong for their very platonic relationship.  Completely platonic.  Painfully so, one could argue.

Neither of them pulled away though.

In the next bed over, Barnes was trying to untangle his jacket from around Captain Rogers, who was back to his usual shape.

Virtual monitors popped up to display their vital signs, and Rogers' temperature sprang from fatally low to near normal in the space of seconds.  He coughed and flinched.  "No, please I can't--"  
  
"It's okay," Barnes told him, giving up on the jacket and gently touching his hair. "It's okay, it's still today.  We had pancakes for breakfast, remember?  You might have lost a few hours, is all."  
  
"Bucky, the ice, I--"  
  
"You're not going in the ice.  I swear."  
  
They don't tell you, when you sign up to wear robot armor in defense of your nation's interests, that you might end up watching as a genuine hero chokes back a sob and whispers, "What about you?"  
  
Or that another hero might whisper back, "Not me, either.  Not this time."

Barnes looked up at Maximoff.  "Can you find Enchantress for me?"

After a heavy pause, Maximoff said quietly, "The spell will not be broken by her death."

Barnes' metal arm whirred and recalibrated menacingly, until Rogers shivered and patted him.  They had some kind of wordless conversation with only their eyes.  Barnes sighed.  He tugged his jacket free and arranged himself on the bed at Rogers' side.

"What will end it?" Tony asked.  His jaw twitched in that way that meant he was ready to stay up all week working on the solution.

Maximoff took a deep breath.  She held a hand out and closed her eyes.

Green tendrils scattered away from Rogers' form, and a deep red enveloped him and seemed to fade into his skin, focussing into a mark on his chest.  It looked something like a backward letter C, and it stayed there after the glow faded away.  

"The spell is not removed entirely," she warned, “the Captain will continue to be transformed and teleported away, but the distance will not be far, and the spell is weak enough now to be broken."

"Great," Tony said.  He shifted around for a better view, and casually slung his arm over Rhodey's shoulders in the process.  "How?"

"It is...like a curse.  It is magic, and it binds even me.  I cannot tell you any more."

That cleared everything up.  If curses existed in the real world, they'd probably get broken the same way they did in the stories.  Not that Rhodey approved of curses existing, but reality never had felt the need to clear things with him.  

He hoped like hell that his own future never rested on admitting who his one true love was.

"Fucking magic," Tony muttered again.  “Rogers, looks like you need to get with making a firstborn child to give to the Wicked Witch here.”

Maximoff elegantly raised her middle finger at him and walked away with a superior smile.

When the silence dragged out for too long, which in Tony's case meant about three seconds, Tony turned back to Rhodey.  "So.  Did you hit that alert button on accident, or do you plan to call me for every little thing now?"

"Oh yeah," Rhodey said, putting on a bored tone.  "Next time I lose the remote, you're the first one I'll call."

"Why would you even be using a remote?  You've got voice commands."

"I already told you why."  Rhodey turned so he wouldn't be looking at Tony's eyes anymore.  "Back me up, guys, talking to the tv is creepy, right?"

Rogers shrugged.  "No creepier than using a magic wand with buttons on it."

"The buttons are quiet, at least," said Barnes.  "Won't wake anybody up."

"I don't care if you wake me up.  I'd--" Rogers closed his eyes and muttered, "It doesn't bother me."

"Bothers me.  I have to look at you, and you definitely need your beauty sleep."  

Rogers snorted, and Barnes reached out and wiped a hand down his face.

"You are such a shit," Rogers said.  His eyes were still closed, and there was a hell of a lot of affection in his voice.

Barnes glanced down at the mark the spell had left, and his smile turned fixed and distant.  "Yeah, I know."

"What about hand gestures," Tony said.  "Are they too much for your delicate television watching sensibilities?"

Rogers opened one eye.  "Like sign language?"

Tony smiled.  He was probably imagining little deaf kids teaching their families how to talk to the tv.  He was an amazingly kind and generous person, when he wasn't busy being an asshole.

No, that wasn't true, he usually did all of those things concurrently.

 

* * *

 

Steve spent most of the night propped up in the hallway, watching Bucky sleep.

He couldn't escape the memory of the cold.

Nothing was real anymore, and he needed to know that Bucky was there.  Safe in bed.  Comfortable.  Warm.

If there was one thing Bucky deserved, it was being warm.

Bucky deserved so many things.  Every bright wonderful thing he'd ever wanted, he deserved.  Every sweet thing he'd never even dreamed of wanting.  

Bucky deserved the best of everything.

Steve curled in on himself and shivered against the wall.

He didn't sleep.


	2. Chapter Two

Steve was gone.  It wasn’t even dawn yet, he had just woken up and Steve wasn’t fucking there, which meant that he was lost somewhere in the city, looking like some kind of helpless animal, at the mercy of cars or cats or assholes who like to hurt things smaller than themselves.

Fuck.  The more things fucking change…

Bucky pulled on his tac pants instead of jeans, just in case there was going to be more swimming.  Wet jeans weren’t the worst thing he’d ever lived through, but they were definitely on the list.    


The police scanner was surprisingly quiet, no strange animal calls to work with this time.  He ran through the park, ignoring the dealers and the early morning joggers alike as he scanned high and low for anything that looked out of place, anything that might be Steve.  Not like out of place had much meaning here -- Manhattan had been a special slice of weird back in the forties, and three quarters of a century was a hell of a long time for all that strangeness to marinate.

Most of the time it was comforting.  Now, not knowing what Steve looked like, knowing that there was a decent chance he could find some guy out walking his pet kangaroo was just irritating.

Nothing, still nothing on the scanner that might be useful, and a quick scroll through the news on his phone didn’t reveal anything helpful either.  No hints, no clues, no idea where to head next.    


God he fucking hated this curse.  Almost as much as he hated the cure.

True love's kiss.   
  
Bucky heard the words in Sarah Rogers' voice, high and soft, with a lilting accent so unlike his own mother's.    
  
Winifred Barnes told stories of salty tears and bitter herbs, of candles that could last through a siege and a prophet who could part waves.   
  
Sarah Rogers told stories of vengeful pookas and warrior queens, of selkies that could ride on water and a midwife who could outwit changelings.   
  
Steve and Bucky listened to all of the stories together, and together they formed a patchwork of folklore that was only for the two of them, where a thimble of milk was placed at the empty seat for Elijah.   
  
He knew that Steve must have figured out how to break the spell by now.  He thought about joking that Steve should sleep with a honeysuckle crown so that he could dream of his true love, except...   
  
He didn't want to watch Steve fall in love.  Not again.  It had hurt enough last time, and now...   
  
It didn't matter.   
  
It didn't matter what Bucky wanted.  He wouldn't let it matter.

On a whim, Bucky started jogging north, because it was as good a direction as any.  He had only gone a few blocks when he hit the jackpot.

It really wasn’t unusual to see confrontations between busses and pigeons in the city, confrontations that usually ended badly for the pigeons.  What made this one particularly interesting was that the pigeon (approximately two pounds) seemed to have the upper hand against the bus (approximately thirty three thousand pounds, not including the driver and passengers, approximately two thousand additional pounds).  The window the driver had left open was clearly a tactical mistake, but not one that should have changed the outcome in a skirmish between an ordinary pigeon and an ordinary bus.

Obviously, this was no ordinary pigeon.

Bucky ran out towards the bus, heedless of traffic, pausing only to slide across the hood of a taxi that was disinclined to stop for a mere pedestrian.  The pigeon took one look at Bucky and calmed down enough for him to snag the bird and tuck him into his coat.

“Yea, fuck you too, buddy,” the bus driver called out as Bucky walked away.  There was nothing in the world like New York gratitude, he thought as he waved a cheerful goodbye, middle finger glinting faintly in the soft light of daybreak.

He kept the pigeon under his coat until he got back to the tower, and then he let Steve hop around on his arm.  Steve wobbled in place when the receptionist called out a hello to them across the lobby.

Bucky waved with his other hand and held back a laugh.  Steve never was much for talking to women.

Which was why he was currently a bird.  Fuck.  It was probably Bucky's own fault.  He hadn't exactly been helping.

As the elevator doors slid closed, Bucky murmured to Steve, " It's not gonna change anything, you know.  You'll find..." 

Bucky couldn't bring himself to say 'your true love', even while Steve was a pigeon.  He cleared his throat.  "You'll find the right girl, and she'll be this big part of your life, but we'll still be friends and all.  Best friends.  Like always.  All the shit we've been through didn't change it, nothing will."

Steve looked patiently up at him.

"The only thing is,"  Bucky said, gathering enough courage to finally say this, "The double dating, like back in the old days?  I don't...You know I'd do anything you ask me to, but please don't ask me that.  I don't know if I can take it."

Steve fluffed his wings, whatever that meant, and the elevator doors opened again.

“Don’t worry, Steve, Wanda’ll get you fixed up right away,” he said as he walked into the common room, where the woman herself was getting a plate of pancakes from...Steve.  Who was holding a spatula and wearing a shirt that was unnecessarily tight and definitely not covered in feathers and sitting on Bucky’s shoulder.

“What.” Bucky said, trying to figure out what the hell was going on.

“What,” Steve said, sounding somehow both disappointed and unimpressed, which was a hell of a combo.

“Coo,” said the pigeon, carefully preening Bucky’s stubble.

“That is not Steve,” Wanda pointed out, somewhat unnecessarily in Bucky’s opinion, since Steve was clearly standing right there, glowering instead of cooing.  Not that Bucky wanted to see Steve coo, or cuddle up against his chest, or nibble on his neck.  Nope.  Not even a little bit.

Well.  Maybe a little bit.

“I am not,” Steve growled, “a  _ fucking _ pigeon.”  The clatter of the spatula into the sink as he stormed away was enough to draw the bird’s attention away from grooming Bucky.

“Coo?” it trilled, cocking its head to one side.

“You and me both, pal,” Bucky sighed.  “You and me both.”

 

* * *

 

It wasn't exactly hard to tell it was Steve.

Sam had just finished the first of his usual laps through the park when a goofy looking dog, with stubby legs and orange and white fur, came and ran beside him for few paces, then let loose and raced in a circle around his ankles.

"Steve?" 

The dog barked sharply three times and ran another loop around him.

"You manage to be a smartass even as a corgi.  That's impressive."

Steve wagged his tail happily.    


Sam shook his head and pretended to be annoyed. "All right, let's get you back to the Tower."

He set off in that direction, with Steve at his heels, but half a block later, he spotted a cop propped on a bench along the path.  A very white looking cop.  That was...less than ideal.  Clint might be able to ignore the leash laws and let Lucky run loose, but Sam didn't figure he'd be able to do the same.

He took a left.  There'd been a street vendor out here yesterday--Yeah, there they were--Selling overpriced dog stuff to the tourists.  Sam didn't mind being a tourist for Steve.  He'd certainly done worse for him.

The vendor was pretty in a kid-next-door kind of way.  He thought maybe they were Puerto Rican.  They had big brown eyes and round cheeks and a knowing smile.  They looked up at his approach.  "Hey friend.  Gotta have a collar and a leash, city'll take your pretty puppy away."

"I was thinking the same thing.  Have anything in red?"

"For you?"  They looked him up and down, and he crossed his arms over his chest for maximum effect because why the hell not?  Flirting was fun.  They looked back up at his face again and smirked.  "Anything you want."

He laughed and looked over the display.  They did have red, and black, and white, and pink, and rainbow polkadots, and...  "Oh, the stars and stripes."  He pulled it out and bent down.  Asking Steve to wear the thing was bad enough, the guy ought to at least get a say in what color it was.  "What do you think, too corny?"

Steve ran in a little circle, which Sam took for enthusiastic approval.    


The vendor grinned at him.  "Hey, you like that, you'll love this."  They reached up and grabbed a bag from the rack overhead, dropping it into Sam's hands like any good salesperson would.

"You've got to be kidding." 

Steve tilted his head, curious.  The vendor said, "I think he wants to try it on."  They whipped the little sweater out of the package and snapped it around Steve's body faster than Sam imagined was possible.

Okay, Sam knew it was a sales tactic and all, but the 'awww' sound the vendor made was completely appropriate.

"You mind if I take a picture?"  They already had their phone out, aimed and ready, but they waited for permission.

Sam appreciated it.  A lot.  Steve probably appreciated it even more.  Or he would, if he wasn't a dog.  "Yeah, go ahead."

"You ready buddy?" they asked Steve, and they snapped a few pictures.  When they stood up again, they flipped through them.  "Oh, that's..."

"Patriotic," Sam supplied.  They had somehow caught Steve in a perfect sunbeam, which made the fur on his ears almost seem to glow as he looked heroically off into the distance, his Captain America sweater gleaming proudly on his back, backlit by the snow on the grass.  "That is adorable in ways you don't even know.  Can you send me a copy?"

He quickly punched his password into his phone.

"You trying to get my number?"  The vendor looked him up and down again, with a wicked tilt to their lips, and Sam suddenly realized that they had a light dusting of freckles on their cheeks and nose.

"You want to give it to me?"  He raised an eyebrow and held out his phone and they  _ grinned. _     


"I think maybe I do."  They found his contacts list and started typing.

Sam knew then that he'd be texting them later.  He didn't know what shape of things he might find under their clothes, but he was pretty sure he wanted to find out, and to make them feel incredible in the process.  He fucking loved living in New York, where people had some kind of chance to be who they wanted to be. 

 

* * *

 

Sometimes Natasha liked to throw things out just to see how people would react.  It was more fun than wondering who had chosen hotdogs for dinner on the same day Steve had been a Corgi  (Tony), and it was far more fun than listening to Steve and Tony bickering about the Accords again, so now seemed like a great opportunity.

“Steve, even you have to admit that when more than seventy nations agree on something, it’s probably a good idea to at least give it a chance,” she said.

Direct hit.  Steve stuck out his jaw, making him look mulish in more than just attitude.  “You know what else a whole bunch of nations agreed on?” he asked, gesticulating wildly with his hotdog.

“Fuckin’ Sudetenland,” Bucky finished for him like they had rehearsed it.

“ _ Fuckin’ _ Sudetenland,” Steve agreed, half the hotdog now crammed in his mouth and partially chewed.  Natasha tuned out the rest of his rant and thanked her lucky stars that he had turned down the date she tried to arrange with Soo-Lin from accounting.  Soo-Lin had standards, and while Captain America might meet them in full uniform while on his best behavior, a Steve Rogers who talked with his mouth full and currently had mustard dripping down his shirt most certainly wouldn’t.  Even Wanda, who usually looked at Steve with wide little-sister eyes, scrunched her nose in annoyance.

Steve looked like he was running out of steam.  Time to spin him back up again.  “The next time we get called out we should coordinate rescue and recovery efforts with the Red Cross,” she said lightly, like she had just thought of it.  Really, she had been saving this gem for weeks, waiting for just the right opportunity.

It worked even better than she had expected.  Steve looked like she had just personally betrayed him by kicking an entire basket of puppies, and Barnes almost inhaled his third hotdog, which he had been in the process of cramming into his mouth.

“Those bastards are still around!?”  Bucky made a halfhearted attempt at chewing before he swallowed the hotdog almost whole.  “Those motherfuckers.  Of fucking course they’re still around.”

“Bastards,” Steve agreed.

“No no no no no, I need to hear this story,” Tony said.  “What on earth could the Red Cross have done to piss off the Avatar of Truth and Justice?  Did they sacrifice kittens to Hitler?  Launch Boy Scouts out of cannons?  Because I send the Red Cross a lot of money every year, in part because they are literally one of the least offensive organizations on the planet.  Pepper worked up a list, they were number six.”

“I’ll tell you about the Red fuckin’ Cross,” Barnes said, looking even more murderous than usual.  “There we are, just a bunch of dumb kids sent halfway around the world to be fuckin’ murdered by goddamned laser ray cannons in another fuckin’ country, surrounded by allies who were fuckin’ pissed we didn’t get there sooner.  I mean, don’t get me wrong, they had a fuckin’ point, but that’s neither here nor there.  So every so often, and it wasn’t often enough, we’d get some leave, and maybe there’d be a Red Cross morale station set up.  They were great.  A guy could go in, get himself a haircut to keep lookin’ sharp, pick up some free smokes that had been donated by the folks back home, maybe even a sweater or pair of socks some gal back in the States had knitted to keep yourself warm.”

This was the most words Natasha had heard out of Barnes in one go, and it didn’t look like he was going to stop any time soon.  He was pacing across the floor now like a tiger, waving his hands (with more hotdogs, because clearly the four he had already eaten weren’t enough), while Steve glowered in support from the couch.

“And even when they didn’t have all that, there were two things you could always count on,” he said, poking the hotdog in Tony’s face.

“Coffee and donuts,” Steve growled.

“Coffee and  _ fuckin _ ’ donuts,” Bucky agreed.  “But then, we come in from the field one day, morale low and in need of a boost, so me and Stevie and the boys stumble into a Red Cross tent in search of coffee that didn’t taste like mud and somethin' to eat that wasn’t spam or beans, and you know what happened?”

“They tried to  _ charge us _ for the  _ fucking donuts _ ,” Steve said, righteous indignation in every line of his frame.

“They tried to charge us for the fuckin’ donuts,” Bucky agreed.  “I mean, what’s next?  They charge us for free smokes?  Ten cents for every stitch?  A buck for a blood bag?”   


“I’m sorry, am I hearing you right?  You’re mad at the Red Cross, because they charged you for donuts in the 1940s?” Tony asked.

“You can’t trust them,” Steve said in his Captain America voice.    


“Can’t fuckin’ trust ‘em,” Bucky concurred.

Soo-Lin had dodged a bullet, Natasha privately decided.  Rhodes was probably more her type anyway.

Finally, Bucky dropped onto the couch, casually draping his mustard-stained hand onto Steve's shoulder.  Gross.  They deserved each other.    


Wanda avidly watched to two of them, then frowned and looked away.

Oh.

Interesting. 

* * *

 

 

Tap tap tap tap tap.  Tap tap tap tap tap.  Tap tap tap tap tap.  It was far easier, and less annoying, to concentrate on the slow click of nails against the cool tile on the counter than it was to spend any more time thinking about how incredibly stupid her almost-brother was.

He was as dumb as her actual brother had been, Wanda thought, and the warm fondness memories of Pietro brought to mind almost outweighed the sharp stab of grief she felt every time she remembered that he was gone.

But this was getting out of control.

After months of watching Steve pine hopelessly after someone who was too busy with his own brand of pining to notice that it was entirely mutual and requited, Enchantress’s curse had seemed like the perfect opportunity.

_ "I can't undo the spell, but I can make it breakable."   _ Honestly.  They should be perfectly aware that as a person with the power to alter reality itself just by thinking about it, breaking a spell that Enchantress had thrown in the heat of battle would be child’s play.  A simple physical transformation was something she could undo in her sleep, possibly while comatose.

But.  Watching the way the Winter Soldier had held Steve in his swan form, gentle and tender, had inspired a plan that had maybe been planted by one too many Disney marathons.  

“True love’s kiss” had been a great plan.  Was still a great plan, even if she hadn’t counted on how  _ unbelievably stupid _ Steve and Bucky were.

"Make him a sugar glider next, that would be adorable,” Natasha said from the corner.  

Wanda absolutely did not feel sparks of red energy racing up her back, nor did she jump.  At least, not enough that she’d ever admit to it.  “I did not hear you come in.”  Understatement.

The Widow didn’t dignify that with a response.  “Ooooh, or a sloth!  Just think of all the cuddling they'd have to do."

“You knew?”  Wanda was somehow unsurprised by the flat look Natasha shot her.

“Please, it was obvious.  And I entirely approve, because I was going to try to lock them into a vault together until they finally talked, but this is far more entertaining.  So.  Something extra cuddly.  Maybe a red panda.”

"That's mean."

"So you'll do it?"

"Of course."

 

* * *

 

If Maria had wanted boring, predictable days, there were other fields that would have delivered.  Accounting, maybe, or bank manager.  Still, sometimes it would be nice to be able to have fifteen minutes to eat a sandwich without having to deal with screams, bloodshed, and mass chaos.

If she had wanted that, she would have become a teacher.

Not that there was any evidence of bloodshed yet, but the sheer number of screams indicated that if there wasn’t already blood on the ground, there probably would be soon.  She dumped the remains of her distinctly unsatisfying avocado panini (never buy avocado on the East Coast, it’s always disappointing) and analyzed the movement of the crowd to pinpoint the epicenter of the disturbance.

In a normal city you’d expect people to run away from screaming chaos, but this was a city where she routinely met people whose biggest regret in life was not getting an alien selfie, so there were as many people running towards the noise, iPhones in hand, as there were running away from it.

“Fucking civilians,” Maria muttered as she moved through the crowd.  She didn’t run - it was rarely a good idea to approach an unknown situation at speed - but she moved briskly, maintaining situational awareness and gleaning what she could from overheard bits of conversation.

“It’s just a publicity stunt, man, nobody bothers with museums…”

“--fucking  _ dinosaur _ , with fucking feathers!”

“--like a turkey and a ostrich had a terrifying nightmare baby--”

She finally broke through the final ring of people to find two extremely unhappy Animal Control officers hesitantly poking their poles in the general direction of the biggest cassowary Maria had ever seen.  

“GET BACK, MA’AM, IT’S DANGEROUS,” one yelled, nervous sweat soaking through the polyester of his uniform.

“I’m Agent Hill of SHIELD.  What’s the situation?”

“Oh thank god,” the other said, not taking his eyes off the cassowary, who didn’t look at all intimidated by two men in uniform.  “This thing’s stopped three muggings and a purse snatching just since we got here, but the mayor wants it gone and our boss ain’t too happy at us for taking so long.  Any time we get close it swats our poles out of the way and gives us this look that makes me regret every choice I ever made in my life.”

“It’s fast, ma’am, and strong.  I’m pretty sure those claws could tear you apart if you got too close.”

Morons.  She stuck her hand in her pocket, hitting the key sequence that would send her location directly to Fury.  A glance at the situation board should give him enough information to figure out what was up.  She approached the bird slowly but with confidence, stopping just a few feet away, well within reach of its beak and claws.

“Captain Rogers,” she said.  It wasn’t a question.

The bird bobbed his head once.

“You’ve had your fun, sir, it’s time to return to the tower.”

He sulked the entire way.  Having to watch an oversized chicken sulk on the subway was going into her quarterly performance review when she justified the the size of the raise she was requesting.  Arguing with the MTA employee who tried to keep them from getting on had been good practice for it.

“I really wouldn’t suggest groping that woman,” she said out-loud to a nearby creeper, who did his best to paste on an unconvincing ‘hurt and innocent’ look.  “The bird doesn’t take kindly to sexual assault.”  Steve hissed, a vicious noise that promised hell itself and made the man turn distinctly green before fleeing to the far end of the train car.

On second thought, maybe they didn’t need to go straight back to the tower after all...

* * *

 

 

Steve knew about the contest, of course.

His teammates were some of the most competitive people on the planet, of course they had turned finding him into a contest.

He also knew that Bucky was winning.  By a mile.  He'd found Steve in back alleys and in restaurants and in parks.  It was almost like old times, Bucky wading in to drag him away to safety and comfort and home.

Except there was always a moment, before they got back to Wanda and she turned him into himself again, that was different from anything they'd had before.  A moment where Bucky would pull Steve up and hold him tight.

Bucky still had all of the skills that had made him the greatest assassin in history, but that wasn't the only reason he was winning that contest.

Steve chased after that moment every goddamn day.  He spent embarrassing amounts of time thinking about how it felt to have Bucky's arms around him, and Bucky's voice, rough and soothing, telling him everything would be all right.  Steve couldn't always process the words (apparently turtles didn't have much use for language, and as a he kitten he had cared more about how Bucky smelled than the sounds he made), but it didn't matter.  For that moment, he was warm and cared for and he felt...he felt like he was where he belonged.  Like he had finally found his place in the world.

Today wouldn't be any different.  

He had woken up in a hot dog place.  Not just any hot dog place, the one with the good coney sauce and the bad relish.  He knew the place immediately, before he even looked around.

The next thing he realized was that in this form, he could get to Bucky no matter where he was.

Being a cassowary had been better, in a lot of ways, because he'd been bigger and more dangerous.  Chasing people down when he was a 'fucking velociraptor with wings,' as Clint had called him, had been one of the few highlights of this whole obnoxious experience.

But a cassowary wasn't unstoppable.  Not like this.

He did secretly wish he was something cuddlier, but he'd worry about that later.  First he had to find Bucky, and get his moment.

He sniffed around and found a crack in the wall, where the pipes went out, just big enough for him to slip through.  

The sign out front didn't mean anything to him, the familiar letters just meaningless shapes to this version of his brain, even though he remembered having read them.

He had recognized the symbol Wanda left on his chest,too.  

Beyt.  He heard the word in Winifred Barnes voice, low and gentle, patiently teaching him as she taught Bucky, until they could both read scraps of the Torah.  Steve still thought of her every time he put on his helmet, with the Aleph on his forehead.

Beyt.  It meant home.  It meant family.  It meant Bucky, in so many ways.

His one true love.  Of course it was Bucky.  Who wouldn't love him?  Probably half the people who knew him did, and Steve didn't begin to understand the other half.  The boy who could sweet talk his way into a dance with any girl around had gone off to war, suffered decades of unimaginable horrors, and he had come back with a determination to be an even better man than before.  Of course Steve loved him beyond all reckoning.  

He lived for that one moment of the day, and he hated the one that came after.

He was careful not to linger, every time Wanda changed him back.  Bucky might be perfectly willing to cuddle up to a sloth or a rabbit, but that didn't mean anything when Steve was Steve.

He hated it.

He scurried down the alley, around the back of a dry cleaners place.  The chemicals there smelled like pain and death, and Steve instinctively hurried past, down to the other end, down to where...

Blood.

Not much of it, just a few drops so far, and a bright smell of knife, and two humans, and fear.

Damn, he wished he was a cassowary again.  No mugger would stand a chance against a cassowary.

Oh well, he'd make do.  He scrambled to the top of a nearby trashcan, gauged the distance to the mugger, and launched himself at their back.

He fell a little short of his mark, but he didn't think that would matter.  He bit down hard and locked his jaws in place, flattening his ears against the screaming and the swatting that followed.

The screaming had its benefits.  It was a pretty good way to draw the attention of the former greatest assassin in history.

Steve smelled him before he saw him.  Leather, Bay Rum aftershave, and the crinkly smell of adamantium.  That was his Bucky all right.

He was a shadow among the shadows, rising silently out of the morning gloom, teeth glinting in a dangerous smile.

The mugger, distracted by Steve's teeth, didn't notice Bucky's approach.  Not that noticing would have helped.  

One punch, one unconscious mugger.  Bucky caught them by the shoulders before they fell and eased them to the ground.

Steve unclenched his jaw and backed up, frantically wiping at his face.

"Hey," Bucky said softy.  He lowered his hand to the ground, and Steve rushed over to bump it with his head.  "I really fuckin' hope that's you, Stevie.  I'd hate to think there's gonna be a wave of ass-biting rats in the city."

Sitting back on his haunches and glaring so hard his whiskers twitched just made Bucky laugh, so Steve climbed up his arm and wriggled his way under his jacket. 

Bucky sighed.  "Joke's on you, Stevie.  That's your own shirt you're getting blood stains all over."

Steve couldn't imagine caring about that.  He pressed his face against the shirt and listened to Bucky's heartbeat, because it was where he belonged.  If only for a moment.

* * *

 

 

“Mister Stark, Captain Rogers is in the common area on the hundred and sixth floor,” FRIDAY said, interrupting a sick AC/DC guitar solo.  

“Okay, and?”  Tony welded another piece of his new prototype together without waiting for an answer.  Using the bots was probably (definitely) a more efficient way, but sometimes the lure of hot metal and tungsten gas was too much to resist.

“He’s in an alternate form, sir, and I felt that you might want to be informed before Miz Maximoff arrives to transform him back.”

Interesting.  “What is he this time, FRIDAY?  A panda bear?  A manatee?  Maybe a giraffe?”

“I wouldn’t want to spoil the surprise.”

Again, interesting.  He had played with the logistical regression learning algorithms when he first put FRIDAY together, added in some new code and some kNN decision trees that looked fun, and the results were sometimes surprising.  That was one of the things that made AI so much fun - it was engineering, sure, but engineering with a dash of chaos and chance.  It kept things exciting.

Surprises definitely weren’t something he had programmed in himself, which meant that this was something FRIDAY had developed on its own.  Hard to say if it was going to end up being the stripper-in-an-oversized-cake sort of surprise, or the motor-oil-smoothie sort of surprise.

“Okay, I’m intrigued.  Let’s see what sort of fur Tam Lin’s wearing this time.”

As it turned out, nothing, nothing at all, could have prepared him for what was waiting for him when the lift doors opened.  Nothing was immediately wrong, so Tony made his way (cautiously, he wasn’t entirely an idiot no matter what the gutter press might claim) into the common area.  A clattering from the kitchen caught his attention, followed almost immediately by what looked like the heating element from the toaster rolling across the floor like some sort of steampunk tumbleweed.

“Hey, no taking it out on my appliances!  What did that poor toaster ever do…”

There weren’t many times in his life when Tony found himself at a complete loss for words, but seeing a bald eagle angrily disassembling every single appliance in the kitchen certainly did the trick.

At least, it did until Steve’s head swiveled towards Tony, and he let out an angry cry.  It wasn’t the majestic eagle call popularized by Hollywood (that, in fact, was the call of the red-tailed hawk, which Clint delighted in telling people every time they heard it on TV).  No, the noise that came out of Steve’s beak sounded like a cross between a demented witch’s cackle and a rusty swing, and it was more than sufficient to break Tony’s temporary paralysis.

“Cap?  I just want you to know that this is the greatest day of my entire life, and that you have never, ever looked so patriotic,” Tony wheezed out between laughs.  “FRIDAY, please tell me you’re recording this.  I need it backed up, like, everywhere.”

Possibly he should try to catch his breath, clear the tears out of his eyes, so he could at least see it if Steve decided to attack him with those two-inch talons (they could apply over a thousand pounds of pressure per inch, a helpful voice in the back of his mind informed him.  Thanks helpful voice!), but honestly, seeing Steve “I wore patriotic pajamas before it was cool” Rogers as the emblem of the US was far, far too entertaining to worry about such pedestrian matters as mere personal survival.

“Don’t worry, you look positively majestic,” Tony said, which might have gone over better if he had managed to keep a straight face for long enough to get the whole sentence out.  The snort at the end probably didn’t help.

Steve tried to respond, letting out another squeaky chuckle, which set Tony off again.

Another fun fact courtesy of the voice in the back of his head:  birds can’t see things directly ahead of them, which definitely diminished the power of Steve’s usual glare.  

“Hey Steve, Steve, I have a question for you, something I feel you might be uniquely capable of answering” Tony said, using skills honed during decades of drunken board meetings to conceal-don’t-feel.  “Why don’t eagles ever bother to knock?”

Without waiting for a response, because honestly -- eagle, Tony spit out the punchline.  “Because freedom rings!  No, not the juicer, leave my poor baby al...oh, that’s going to be a challenge to fix.  Ooo, we should have turkey for dinner tonight.  Did you know that Ben Franklin--whoa, shit, that's the espresso machine Steve!  Is nothing sacred?”

The answer to that was apparently 'no.'  By the time Steve was done, the only surviving thing still in the kitchen was Barnes, who didn't even have the decency to sing along to 'The Star-Spangled Banner' with him, and instead just let the murder-bird sit on his arm and stroked its feathers until Wanda showed up and did her razzle dazzle.

As a human person again, Steve guiltily looked over all the destruction and ran a hand through his hair.  "Tony, I--"

"Come on."  Bucky shoved Steve toward the door.  "Let's just get out before he remembers about that music group from the seventies."

"What..?"  Steve glared at Bucky, and then glared at Tony.

"Totally unjustified, I was going with a patriotic theme," Tony explained.  "Next up was Fallout Boy.  'You and I were fire, fire, firewoooorks, that went off too soon...'"

By then they were gone.  Oh well.  He'd call Rhodey.  Rhodey would let him sing the whole song, or at least be entertaining when he shut him down.  Rhodey was the best.

But first he arranged for a big turkey dinner, with all the trimmings.

 

* * *

 

Randomly teleporting away from home and into the shape of a random animal was bad enough, but this was fucking ridiculous.  Steve was pissed.  Insult to fucking injury, he thought as he worked at the latches of the frankly absurd aquarium he found himself in.  He was pretty sure that Tony had swimming pools smaller than this.

Luckily it wasn’t hard to jimmy open, even from the inside.  He gave a brief thought to the alternatives -- being an actual fish, inside a tank too small for his shift back to super-soldier size, and shivered a little.

At least the water was pleasantly warm this time.  Nothing to make him think about that thing that he didn’t think about.  Ever.  And it tasted nice on his fingers, salty and rich with life and not at all stale.

Still, he was damned if he was going to stay in this particular shape for any longer than he needed to.

He made his way across the room and up the desk to the phone, dialing in one of the emergency numbers that went directly to Friday.  “Please state the nature of your emergency,” the AI stated.

No vocal cords.  Fuck.  Luckily, tactical flexibility was his middle name.  Steven “Tactical Flexibility” Rogers grabbed a pen off the desk, and started tapping it onto the mouthpiece of the phone.

“Ah, morse code.  Very clever, Captain,” Friday said.  “I’m tracing your call now.  Are you currently in a safe situation?”

Steve tapped back harder, not even bothering to pause when Friday tried to interrupt, almost knocking the handset off the desk at one point.

Less than two minutes later, the window shattered as Tony and Rhodes flew into the room, Bucky clinging to the back of the Iron Man suit with one hand, his favorite rifle in the other.  Sam was right behind them, wings strapped on over something that was definitely not his usual tac gear.

“You know, when Friday said that you were caught up in some HYDRA bullshit, this is honestly not at all what I was expecting,” Tony said as he flipped the facemask of his suit up.  

“I think this is the best day of my entire life,” Sam said as he fished out his phone.  “I’m going to be late for my date, but you know what?  I ain’t even mad.  This is going to be your new contact picture,” he laughed as he snapped a picture of the clearly disgruntled octopus.

Nailing Sam right between the eyes with the pen he had been holding didn’t make Steve feel any better.

* * *

 

 

Natasha ordered calamari for dinner that night, an entire platter of it.  

“Isn’t that, you know, kind of insensitive?” Clint asked, glancing towards Steve who looked paler than usual.

“No, it’s not,” Wanda answered decisively before Natasha could say anything, before taking an unnecessarily aggressive bite.

“Insensitivity would imply that certain people didn’t have heads so thick that not even radiation can penetrate,” Natasha agreed.

"Did I...Is it me?" Clint asked.  "Are we talking about me?  Because usually when you talk about thick heads you mean me, but I don't think I did anything dumb today.  At least, not so far."

“Not this time,” Natasha said, glaring harder at Bucky, who was alternating between glaring right back and shooting Steve wounded-puppy looks of concern.

“I...that doesn’t actually make me feel better for some reason,” Clint said as he reached for the platter, “but I’m starving and this smells delicious so I’m going to stop thinking about it.”

“Seems like a lot of people are actively not thinking about things,” Wanda said, looking hard at Steve.  He managed to go paler, somehow, but continued on pretending that Bucky and everything on Bucky’s side of the room didn’t exist, like just making eye-contact would be enough make his secrets break out and spill all over the dinner table.  “Boys!”

“Boys are idiots,” Natasha said with a nod.

Clint didn’t bother arguing.  He knew a losing battle when he saw one.

* * *

 

 

One minute Bucky was cuddling with an otter, the next there was a flash of green light and Steve back in his usual skin, scrambling away from Bucky like he hadn’t just been nuzzling his chest a few seconds before.  It was kind of depressing how much of a routine this was becoming.

Wanda seemed to have an awful lot of appointments lately.  Hair, nails, facials with Natasha - it was strange how she always seemed to leave right before Bucky got back to the tower with Steve.  But he wasn’t exactly one to look a gift horse in the mouth, not when it meant cuddling with Steve in any form, sometimes for long enough that he changed back without her help.

Bucky flipped off the tv and frowned at Steve.  "I'm starting to think you like it."

Steve's eyes went wide, and then narrowed for a fight.  "Oh, yeah.  Bein' a helpless kitten was terrific.  Bein' a goddamn octopus was swell.  But my favorite part was when my oldest friend didn't know me from a feral fucking pigeon."

Bucky wondered when he'd gotten demoted from 'best friend' to 'oldest friend'.  What the fuck was that about?

"It was fighting a bus, Steve.  A fucking  _ bus _ !  And it was winning, so I think I get a fucking pass there."

“You still should have been able to tell.”  Steve had that old look on his face, the one he got when he was mad at the world and just wanted a fight with whoever was closest.

Christ on a crutch, he must have pissed someone off in a past life to have fallen so hard for someone with such a punchable face.  “How many times have I found you now?  Fifteen?  Twenty?  I knew you when you were a hummingbird stuck inside a ridiculous artisanal mayonnaise shop, and when you were an anteater in a dumpster.  Can we forget the fucking pigeon?”

“There I am,” Steve says, working himself up into a proper rant, “making breakfast, and you turn up with a fucking rabid pigeon chewing on your face.”

Again with the fucking pigeon.  What the fuck did Steve have against pigeons?  “Enough with the fucking pigeon!  Maybe if you’d hurry up and find your one true love I wouldn’t go around picking up stray pigeons!”

"There’s no point in looking, I already know who it is."

Okay.

It wasn't the worst thing he'd ever felt.  He'd survived things nobody should ever lived through, this was...Fuck, it was fucking awful.

"You what?" Bucky said, and his voice was kind of steady, which was a nice surprise, under the circumstances.  "Then why haven’t you kissed her, you fucking idiot?"

Steve looked scandalized.  "I can't just do that.  People don't just do that.  Not when...It's complicated, Buck."

"I find that hard to believe.  Sounds to me like you’re just being as moronic as ever.  Go tell ‘em, get your kiss, and you can live happily ever after without turning into a fucking emu every couple of days."

“It’s not that easy,” Steve said, flushing red and looking away, eyes darting to the table and the corners of the room and anything that wasn’t Bucky.

It shouldn’t hurt so much that Steve couldn’t even look at him.  “It could be!” Bucky yelled, strangely relieved to have an outlet for the morass of love and jealousy and sadness that was bubbling up inside.  “It really fucking could be.  Because you’re you, and anyone who doesn’t…”  

Steve started shouting right back, words tripping right over Bucky’s.  “It isn't! Because being a fucking emu is better than finding out that you don't love me back.”  Steve looked away, jaw clenching as his voice dropped to almost a whisper.  “I’m in love with you, you fucking asshole.”

Wait.

Wait.

What?

Before he had a chance to process anything, before his brain could even think about coming back online, Bucky felt himself moving, emotions spilling out in a rough growl as he grabbed Steve’s arms and pushed him up against the wall.  "Tell me you want this," he said, begged, and he knew his face was giving away too much, was giving away everything.

The next second stretched out into eternity, and then collapsed into a series of movements that went by too fast for him to track.  Now Bucky was the one pressed up against the wall, with one of Steve’s hands in his hair and the other around his waist and somehow they were kissing while red and green fireworks shot off around them, and he was pretty sure that this, right here, was the universe apologizing for all the crap it had ever put him through.

Worth it.

“There, see?” Bucky said once Steve pulled away.  “Told ya’ it was easy."  Steve’s happy laugh as he leaned in to kiss Bucky again was something he hoped he could hear again, forever, maybe even naked in bed.  Definitely naked in bed.  Soon.  "Show me the mark.”

"I think it's gone now," Steve said, looking down at his shirt.

"I know.  Show me."

Steve shrugged and pulled down his collar, revealing about a mile of unmarked skin.  

Bucky reached out to put his hand over Steve's heart, and he couldn't keep his fingers from shaking.  "You really love me."

He hadn't meant it as a question, but Steve answered it like one anyway.  "Of course I do.  Always have.  And this means you must..."

"Absolutely.  Completely.  Even when I didn't know my own name, I knew I belonged with you."

Steve took a deep, shaky breath, like he was holding back tears, and chuckled, “If I’d known you were this easy I’d have asked you on a date forever ago.”

“You’re the only one who thinks I’m easy,” Bucky said back, and maybe that was too honest, but fuck.  It was true, the truest thing in the world.

“So what do you say, sweetheart?” Steve asked, all earnest blue eyes and lips swollen from kissing.  Bucky had to kiss them again just to get a taste.  “I’ve been stuck on you forever, Buck,” Steve continued, “so let me take you out, treat you right.  I found a great little place that has the best burgers I’ve ever eaten and all-you-can-eat fries.”

Bucky blinked once, confused, before pecking Steve on the lips again, just because he could.  “Are you...asking me out on a date?”

Steve blushed even brighter and nodded, and the absurdity of it made Bucky laugh, tucking his face into Steve’s neck because it was close and because he could do that now.  True love.  It was almost enough to make him forgive magic for not being generally punchable.

"Stop laughing, fucker,” Steve said, and it was nice to know that even if they were in love they were still the same people.  Steve was still an asshole, and Bucky was a dick, and no amount of kisses would change that.  Although they should maybe test that for science.  “I want to take you out and treat you to nice things and maybe cuddle on the couch while we watch movies, is that so wrong?”

Bucky laughed, loud and bright.  He was in love with the most ridiculous man in the world, who was apparently stupid enough to love him right back.  “Anything you want, sweetheart,” he said, relishing the look the endearment put on Steve’s face.  “Anything at all.  But there’s something you really need to know first.”

“What’s that?” Steve asked, looking dopier than ever, and so beautiful it hurt.

“I’m definitely the sort of dame who puts out on the first date.”

Steve somehow blushed even darker.  "I'm not," he said, breaking into a grin.  "But for you, I'd make an exception."

* * *

 

 

“Nicely done,” Natasha said with a rare smile of approval.

“I didn’t think it would take as long as it did,” Wanda said with a roll of her eyes.  “How is it possible for two people to be so blind?”

“Consider it practice,” Natasha said as she pulled out her nail file.  “I think the other two are going to be even more of a challenge.”

**Author's Note:**

> If you'd like to reblog the link, [here's a handy tumblr post](http://sproings.tumblr.com/post/163466311451/once-upon-some-bullshit-chapter-1) Thanks so much for reading, commenting, leaving kudos, and just generally being you.


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